Dynamic-Grouping bandwidth reservation scheme for multimedia wireless networks

In wireless networks carrying multimedia traffic (voice, video, data, and image), it becomes necessary to provide a quality-of-service(QoS) guarantee for multimedia traffic connections supported by the network. In order to provide mobile hosts with high QoS in the next-generation wireless networks, efficient and better bandwidth reservation schemes must be designed. This paper presents a novel dynamic-grouping bandwidth reservation scheme as a solution to support QoS guarantees in the next-generation wireless networks. The proposed scheme is based on the probabilistic resource estimation to provide QoS guarantees for multimedia traffic in wireless cellular networks. We establish several reservation time sections, called groups, according to the mobility information of mobile hosts of each base station. The amount of reserved bandwidth for each base station is dynamically adjusted for each reservation group. We use the dynamic-grouping bandwidth reservation scheme to reduce the connection blocking rate and connection dropping rate, while increasing the bandwidth utilization. The simulation results show that the dynamic-grouping bandwidth reservation scheme provides less connection-blocking rate and less connection-dropping rate and achieves high bandwidth utilization.     

Dynamic Code Assignment Medium Access (DCAMA) Protocol for Wireless Integrated Services Networks

A medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless mobile networks that supports integrated services and provides quality of service (QoS) support is presented and evaluated via simulation. A controlled random access protocol which allows all terminals to dynamically share a group of spread spectrum spreading codes is used. The protocol provides mobile terminals the access control required for efficient transfer of integrated traffic with QoS guarantees. Two service classes are provided; "best-effort" service, with priority queueing, and reserved bandwidth circuit service. The performance of the protocol is evaluated via simulation for traffic consisting of integrated voice, data and compressed video. The performance assessment measure is packet delay.     

An uplink CDMA system architecture with diverse QoS guarantees forheterogeneous traffic

The uplink access control problems for cellular code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems that service heterogeneous traffic with various types of quality-of-service (QoS) and use multicode CDMA to support variable bit rates are addressed. Considering its distinct QoS requirements, class-I real-time traffic (e.g., voice and video) is differentiated from class-II non-real-time traffic (e.g., data). Connection-oriented transmission is achieved by assigning mobile-oriented code channels for class-I traffic, where each corresponding mobile needs to pass an admission test. Class-II traffic is transmitted in a best-effort manner through a transmission-rate request access scheme which utilizes the bandwidth left unused by class-I traffic. Whenever a mobile has class-II messages to transmit, the mobile requests code channels via a base station-oriented transmission-request code channel, then, according to the base station scheduling, the transmission is scheduled and permitted. Addressed are the admission test for class-I connections, transmission power allocation, and how to maximize the aggregate throughput for class-II traffic. The admission region of voice and video connections and the optimum target signal-to-interference ratio of class-II traffic are derived numerically. The performance of class-II traffic transmissions in terms of average delay is also evaluated and discussed     

Cross-Layer Scheduling with QoS Support over a Distributed Queuing MAC for Wireless LANs

Distributed Queuing Collision Avoidance (DQCA) is an efficient MAC protocol designed for infrastructure Wireless LANs. In this paper, four algorithms are proposed that alter the FIFO scheduling order of DQCA in order to meet specific network requirements. The proposed schemes combine the efficiency of opportunistic scheduling with the QoS provisioning through service differentiation. The opportunistic policy encourages transmissions at higher rates when the channel condition is good and is implemented through a cross-layer dialogue between the PHY and the MAC layers. The key idea of service differentiation is to assign priorities to traffic flows with different requirements in order to provide QoS guarantees. The throughput, delay and jitter performance of the proposed schemes has been evaluated through simulations for a scenario with heterogeneous traffic of voice, video, best-effort and background data traffic flows.     

Mobile flow-aware networks for mobility and QoS support in the IP-based wireless networks

As the volume of mobile traffic consisting of video, voice, and data is rapidly expanding, a challenge remains with the mobile transport network, which must deliver data traffic to mobile devices without degrading the service quality. Since every Internet service holds its own service quality requirements, the flow-aware traffic management in fine granularity has been widely investigated to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) in the IP networks. However, the mobile flow-aware management has not been sufficiently developed yet because of the inherent constraints of flow routing in the mobile networks regarding flow-aware mobility and QoS support. In this paper, we propose a flow-aware mobility and QoS support scheme called mobile flow-aware network (MFAN) for IP-based wireless mobile networks. The proposed scheme consists of dynamic handoff mechanisms based on QoS requirements per flow to reduce the processing overhead of the flow router while ensuring QoS guarantee to mobile flows. The performance analyses of the proposed scheme demonstrate that MFAN successfully supports the mobile flow traffic delivery while satisfying the QoS requirement of flows in the wireless mobile IP networks.     

Optimal resource allocation and adaptive call admission control for voice/data integrated cellular networks

Resource allocation and call admission control (CAC) are key management functions in future cellular networks, in order to provide multimedia applications to mobiles users with quality of service (QoS) guarantees and efficient resource utilization. In this paper, we propose and analyze a priority based resource sharing scheme for voice/data integrated cellular networks. The unique features of the proposed scheme are that 1) the maximum resource utilization can be achieved, since all the leftover capacity after serving the high priority voice traffic can be utilized by the data traffic; 2) a Markovian model for the proposed scheme is established, which takes account of the complex interaction of voice and data traffic sharing the total resources; 3) optimal CAC parameters for both voice and data calls are determined, from the perspective of minimizing resource requirement and maximizing new call admission rate, respectively; 4) load adaption and bandwidth allocation adjustment policies are proposed for adaptive CAC to cope with traffic load variations in a wireless mobile environment. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed CAC scheme is able to simultaneously provide satisfactory QoS to both voice and data users and maintain a relatively high resource utilization in a dynamic traffic load environment. The recent measurement-based modeling shows that the Internet data file size follows a lognormal distribution, instead of the exponential distribution used in our analysis. We use computer simulations to demonstrate that the impact of the lognormal distribution can be compensated for by conservatively applying the Markovian analysis results.     

End-to-End Adaptive QoS Provisioning over GPRS Wireless Mobile Network

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) offers performance guaranteed packet data services to mobile users over wireless frequency-division duplex links with time division multiple access, and core packet data networks. This paper presents a dynamic adaptive guaranteed Quality-of-Service (QoS) provisioning scheme over GPRS wireless mobile links by proposing a guaranteed QoS media access control (GQ-MAC) protocol and an accompanying adaptive prioritized-handoff call admission control (AP-CAC) protocol to maintain GPRS QoS guarantees under the effect of mobile handoffs. The GQ-MAC protocol supports bounded channel access delay for delay-sensitive traffic, bounded packet loss probability for loss-sensitive traffic, and dynamic adaptive resource allocation for bursty traffic with peak bandwidth allocation adapted to the current queue length. The AP-CAC protocol provides dynamic adaptive prioritized admission by differentiating handoff requests with higher admission priorities over new calls via a dynamic multiple guard channels scheme, which dynamically adapts the capacity reserved for dealing with handoff requests based on the current traffic conditions in the neighboring radio cells. Integrated services (IntServ) QoS provisioning over the IP/ATM-based GPRS core network is realized over a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) architecture, and mobility is supported over the core network via a novel mobile label-switching tree (MLST) architecture. End-to-end QoS provisioning over the GPRS wireless mobile network is realized by mapping between the IntServ and GPRS QoS requirements, and by extending the AP-CAC protocol from the wireless medium to the core network to provide a unified end-to-end admission control with dynamic adaptive admission priorities.     

Performance analysis for voice/data integration on a finite-buffermobile system

Personal communication service (PCS) networks offer mobile users diverse telecommunication applications, such as voice, data, and image, with different bandwidth and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. This paper proposes an analytical model to investigate the performance of an integrated voice/data mobile network with finite data buffer in terms of voice-call blocking probability, data loss probability, and mean data delay. The model is based on the movable-boundary scheme that dynamically adjusts the number of channels for voice and data traffic. With the movable-boundary scheme, the bandwidth can be utilized efficiently while satisfying the QoS requirements for voice and data traffic. Using our model, the impact of hot-spot traffic in the heterogeneous PCS networks, in which the parameters (e.g., number of channels, voice, and data arrival rates) of cells can be varied, can be effectively analyzed. In addition, an iterative algorithm based on our model is proposed to determine the handoff traffic, which computes the system performance in polynomial-bounded time. The analytical model is validated by simulation     

Per-Stream QoS and Admission Control in Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs)

Ethernet passive optical networks (EPONs) are designed to deliver services for numerous applications such as voice over Internet protocol, standard and high-definition video, video conferencing (interactive video), and data traffic. Various dynamic bandwidth allocation and intra-optical network unit (ONU) scheduling algorithms have been proposed to enable EPONs to deliver differentiated services for traffic with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, none of these protocols and schedulers can guarantee bandwidth for each class of service nor can they protect the QoS level required by admitted real-time traffic streams. In this paper, we propose the first framework for per-stream QoS protection in EPONs using a two-stage admission control (AC) system. The first stage enables the ONU to perform flow admission locally according to the bandwidth availability, and the second stage allows for global AC at the optical line terminal. Appropriate bandwidth allocation algorithms are presented as well. An event-driven simulation model is implemented to study the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in providing and protecting QoS.     

MiFi: a framework for fairness and QoS assurance for current IEEE 802.11 networks with multiple access points

In this paper, we present a framework for providing fair service and supporting quality of service (QoS) requirements in IEEE 802.11 networks with multiple access points (APs). These issues becomes critical as IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN are widely deployed in nationwide networks, linking tens of thousands of "hot-spots" for providing both real-time (voice) and non real-time (data) services to a large population of mobile users. However, both fairness and QoS guarantees cannot be supported in the current 802.11 standard. Our system, termed MiFi, relies on centralized coordination of the APs. During any given time of the "contention-free" period only a set of non-interfering APs is activated while the others are silenced. Moreover, the amount of service granted to an AP is proportional to its load and the system's performance is optimized by employing efficient scheduling algorithms. We show that such a system can be implemented without requiring any modification of the underlying MAC protocol standard or the behavior of the mobile stations. Our scheme is complementary to the emerging 802.11e standard for QoS and guarantees to overcome the hidden node and the overlapping cell problems. Our simulations establish that the system supports fairness and hence can provide QoS guarantees for real-time traffic, while maintaining a relative high throughput.     

Bandwidth Sharing Schemes for Multimedia Traffic in the IEEE 802.11e Contention-Based WLANs

Bandwidth allocation schemes have been well studied for mobile cellular networks. However, there is no study about this aspect reported for IEEE 802.11 contention-based distributed wireless LANs. In cellular networks, bandwidth is deterministic in terms of the number of channels by frequency division, time division, or code division. On the contrary, bandwidth allocation in contention- based distributed wireless LANs is extremely challenging due to its contention-based nature, packet-based network, and the most important aspect: only one channel is available, competed for by an unknown number of stations. As a consequence, guaranteeing bandwidth and allocating bandwidth are both challenging issues. In this paper, we address these difficult issues. We propose and study nine bandwidth allocation schemes, called sharing schemes, with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) for integrated voice/video/data traffic in IEEE 802.11e contention-based distributed wireless LANs. A guard period is proposed to prevent bandwidth allocation from overprovisioning and is for best-effort data traffic. Our study and analysis show that the guard period is a key concept for QoS guarantees in a contention-based channel. The proposed schemes are compared and evaluated via extensive simulations.     

An adaptive bandwidth reservation scheme for high-speed multimediawireless networks

In the next generation high-speed wireless networks, it is important to provide quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees as they are expected to support multimedia applications. This paper proposes an admission control scheme based on adaptive bandwidth reservation to provide QoS guarantees for multimedia traffic carried in high-speed wireless cellular networks. The proposed scheme allocates bandwidth to a connection in the cell where the connection request originates and reserves bandwidth in all neighboring cells. When a user moves to a new cell and a handoff occurs, bandwidth is allocated in the new cell, bandwidth is reserved in the new cell's neighboring cells, and reserved bandwidth in more distant cells is released. The amount of bandwidth to reserve is dynamically adjusted, reflecting the current network conditions. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations of realistic cellular environments. The simulated network consists of a large number of cells, mobile users with various movement patterns are assumed, and a variety of multimedia applications (e.g., audio phone, video conference, video on demand, file transfer, etc.) is considered. It is shown that the proposed scheme provides small handoff dropping probability (i.e., the probability that handoff connections are dropped due to a lack of bandwidth) and achieves high bandwidth utilization     

Fair Delay Optimization-based Resource Allocation Algorithm for Video Traffic over Wireless Multimedia System

The major issue related to the realization of wireless multimedia system is the design of suitable medium access control (MAC) protocol. The design challenge is to maximize the utilization of the limited wireless resources while guaranteeing the various quality of service requirements for all traffic classes especially for the stringent real-time constraint of real time variable bit rate (rt-VBR) video service. In this paper a novel resource allocation algorithm for video traffic is proposed. The proposed allocation algorithm aims to provide fair delay for video packets by minimizing the delay difference among transmitted video packets. At the same time it adaptively controls the allocated resources (bandwidth) for video traffic around the corresponding average bit rate, and has the ability of controlling the quality of service (QoS) offered for video traffic in terms of packet loss probability and average delay. A minimized control overhead of only two bits is needed to increase the utilization efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves very high utilization and provides nearly fair delay among video packets. Its efficiency is also investigated under traffic integration condition with voice and data traffic to show that the QoS offered to video traffic does not change in the presence of the highest priority voice traffic while data traffic increases the channel utilization to 98% by using the remaining bandwidth after voice and video traffic while a good QoS is offered to voice and data traffic.

Scalable architectures for integrated traffic shaping and linkscheduling in high-speed ATM switches

Emerging broad-band switches must accommodate the diverse traffic parameters and quality-of-service requirements of voice, data, and video applications. End-to-end performance guarantees depend on connections complying with traffic contracts as their cells travel through the network. This paper presents a leaky-bucket shaper architecture that scales to a large number of connections with diverse burstiness and bandwidth parameters. In contrast to existing designs, the proposed architecture arbitrates fairly between connections with conforming cells by carefully integrating leaky-bucket traffic shaping with rate-based scheduling algorithms. Through a careful combination of per-connection queueing and approximate sorting, the shaper performs a small, bounded number of operations in response to each arrival and departure, independent of the number of connections and cells. When the shaper must handle a wide range of rate parameters, a hierarchical arbitration scheme can reduce the implementation overheads and further limit interference between competing connections. Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate that the architecture limits cell-shaping delay and traffic distortions, even in periods of heavy congestion. The efficient combination of traffic shaping and link scheduling results in an effective architecture for managing buffer and bandwidth resources in large, high-speed ATM switches     

An efficient resource allocation to improve QoS of 5G slicing networks using general processor sharing‐based scheduling algorithm

Fifth generation (5G) slicing is an emerging technology for software‐defined networking/network function virtualization–enabled mobile networks. Improving the utilization and throughput to meet the quality of service (QoS) requirements of 5G slicing is very important for the operators of mobile networks. With growing data traffic from different applications of numerous smart mobile devices having several QoS requirements, we expect networks to face problems of congestion and overload that prevent the effective functioning of a radio access network (RAN). This paper proposes a more effective packet‐based scheduling scheme for data traffic by 5G slicing with two operation modes for improving the resource utilization of 5G cloud RAN and providing an efficient isolation of the 5G slices. These two operation modes are referred to as static sharing resource (SSR) scheme and dynamic sharing resources (DSR) scheme. The SSR scheme is a modified version of an existing method. The goal of this approach is to reallocate the shared available resources of 5G network fairly and maximize the utilization of bandwidth while protecting a 5G slice from overwhelming other 5G slices. Throughput and delays of the system model are also discussed to show its performance limits. On the basis of the simulation outcomes, we observed that the proposed DSR scheme outperforms the SSR scheme in terms of provided delay and throughput. In addition, the token bucket parameters together with the assigned capacity weight for each slice can be selected and configured based on the required QoS. Finally, a good estimate for the maximum delay bounds of the slices is provided by the derived theoretical delay bound.     

A novel scheduling scheme for multiple traffic classes

In this paper, a novel scheduling scheme is proposed for multiple traffic classes to exploit multiuser diversity of the non-real-time (NRT) traffic. The proposed scheduling algorithm consists of two stages, i.e. at the first scheduling stage, the inter-traffic scheduler dynamically allocates the bandwidth resources to each traffic class by a periodic and triggered way with the objective of maximizing a room for NRT traffic while guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) requirements of real-time (RT) traffics; at the second scheduling stage, the intra-traffic scheduler is used to schedule different users' packets within each traffic class simultaneously. The proposed algorithm not only enhances the system throughput but also satisfies the QoS requirements of RT traffic. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and good performance of the proposed scheme.     

Cross-layer resource allocation for integrated Voice/Data traffic in wireless cellular networks

A major task in next-generation wireless cellular networks is provisioning of quality of service (QoS) over the bandwidth limited and error-prone wireless link. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer design scheme to provide QoS for voice and data traffic in wireless cellular networks with differentiated services (DiffServ) backbone. The scheme combines the transport layer protocols and link layer resource allocation to both guarantee the QoS requirements in the transport layer and achieve efficient resource utilization in the link layer. Optimal resource allocation problems for voice and data flows are formulated to guarantee pre-specified QoS with minimal required resources. For integrated voice/data traffic in a cell, a hybrid time-division/code-division medium access control (MAC) scheme is presented to achieve efficient multiplexing. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cross-layer approach.     

Analysis of Radio Resource Allocation in LTE Uplink

Long term evolution (LTE) uses orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) as the downlink and uplink transmission schemes respectively. The Quality of Service (QoS) provision to users is one of the key objectives of the wireless network operators. This paper analyses an uplink LTE radio scheduler, called bandwidth and QoS aware (BQA) scheduler and evaluates its QoS performance. The BQA uplink scheduler is designed to provide efficient and fair allocation of the radio resources to users according to: the QoS of various traffic classes and the instantaneous channel conditions. The scheduler functionality is divided into time domain packet scheduling (TDPS) and frequency domain packet scheduling (FDPS). In this paper, an innovative feature, that is user QoS provisioning with dynamic QoS weights, is employed for the BQA scheduler along with multi-bearer users support. The QoS performance of the BQA scheduler is analyzed in several simulation scenarios using heterogeneous traffic environment. The results show that the BQA scheduler guarantees provision of QoS to users.     

Providing deterministic packet delays and packet losses in multimedia wireless networks

‘Anytime, anywhere’ communication, information access and processing are much cherished in modern societies because of their ability to bring flexibility, freedom and increased efficiency to individuals and organizations. Wireless communications, by providing ubiquitous and tetherless network connectivity to mobile users, are therefore bound to play a major role in the advancement of our society. Although initial proposals and implementations of wireless communications are generally focused on near‐term voice and electronic messaging applications, it is recognized that future wireless communications will have to evolve towards supporting a wider range of applications, including voice, video, data, images and connections to wired networks. This implies that future wireless networks must provide quality‐of‐service (QoS) guarantees to various multimedia applications in a wireless environment. Typical traffic in multimedia applications can be classified as either Constant‐Bit‐Rate (CBR) traffic or Variable‐Bit‐Rate (VBR) traffic. In particular, scheduling the transmission of VBR multimedia traffic streams in a wireless environment is very challenging and is still an open problem. In general, there are two ways to guarantee the QoS of VBR multimedia streams, either deterministically or statistically. In particular, most connection admission control (CAC) algorithms and medium access control (MAC) protocols that have been proposed for multimedia wireless networks only provide statistical, or soft, QoS guarantees. In this paper, we consider deterministic QoS guarantees in multimedia wireless networks. We propose a method for constructing a packet‐dropping mechanism that is based on a mathematical framework that determines how many packets can be dropped while the required QoS can still be preserved. This is achieved by employing: (1) An accurate traffic characterization of the VBR multimedia traffic streams; (2) A traffic regulator that can provide bounded packet loss and (3) A traffic scheduler that can provide bounded packet delay. The combination of traffic characterization, regulation and scheduling can provide bounded loss and delay deterministically. This is a distinction from traditional deterministic QoS schemes in which a 0% packet loss are always assumed with deterministically bounding the delay. We performed a set of performance evaluation experiments. The results will demonstrate that our proposed QoS guarantee schemes can significantly support more connections than a system, which does not allow any loss, at the same required QoS. Moreover, from our evaluation experiments, we found that the proposed algorithms are able to out‐perform scheduling algorithms adopted in state‐of‐the‐art wireless MAC protocols, for example Mobile Access Scheme Based on Contention and Reservation for ATM (MASCARA) when the worst‐case traffic is being considered. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A distributed scheduling architecture for scalable packet switches

The continuous growth in the demand for diversified quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees in broadband networks introduces new challenges in the design of packet switches that scale to large switching capacities. Packet scheduling is the most critical function involved in the provision of individual bandwidth and delay guarantees to the switched flows. Most of the scheduling techniques proposed so far assume the presence in the switch of a single contention point, residing in front of the outgoing links. Such an assumption is not consistent with the highly distributed nature of many popular architectures for scalable switches, which typically have multiple contention points, located in both ingress and egress port cards, as well as in the switching fabric. We define a distributed multilayered scheduler (DMS) to provide differentiated QoS guarantees to individual end-to-end flows in packet switches with multiple contention points. Our scheduling architecture is simple to implement, since it keeps per-flow scheduling confined within the port cards, and is suitable to support guaranteed and best-effort traffic in a wide range of QoS frameworks in both IP and ATM networks